"old way of life"

Sometime last winter my friends/neighbors/landlords and initial farm employers were clearing out some old files in their basement and came across a copy of the original application I'd mailed in to work for them on their farm here when I was nineteen, my first farm job—really my first real job at all. In response to a question on what interested me about the farm job, I wrote that “I would not be simply another employee of some retail chain. It always saddens me to see the sort of 'old way of life' disappearing. ... Farming is a fundamental institution, what people have done for thousands of years. ... It is not just a job that takes up free time; it will be my life for three months.” Although I knew next to nothing when I wrote it, there's nothing in there that isn't still true.

Recently a new neighbor was telling me about the temporary tutoring work he's been doing and, in conversation, I asked what sort of job he's looking to find more permanently—or whether, like his farm neighbors, he would hope to carve out a life with less distinction between “job” and “the things one does with their days.” And in posing that question, it became clear to me how far removed from my own life the concept is of maintaining that dichotomy of a “career” separate from "non-work life," although I do plenty of work on all sorts of projects every day. They're all simply projects I'm working on, with some being more critical than others.

That “old way of life” I imagined in that old job application isn't farming itself, exactly, but what arises in a world where many people have projects going on that need doing, profitable and non-profitable activities all mixed up together, the sum total of which happening to yield enough money to live on—and where people are tied to place, and therefore to neighbors.

The local plumber, who's in his 40s, was in my basement once and we were talking about Lovettsville history. He said that, of his high school class, about half of his classmates had stayed in the area after graduation. His father, also a plumber and also in my basement, pointed to himself and said, “For me, ninety-five percent.” What that "old way of life” of generational history and overlapping livelihoods generates is a different kind of community, a different kind of neighborliness, a different kind of friendship—there are not "work friends" or "professional connections," which largely evaporate when people change jobs or careers, but "community" and "neighborly" connections that arise as people live their lives in close proximity, doing what matters to them personally and interfacing with each other through the course of their daily activities. And even when people change projects, or switch jobs, they still all live in the same community. That connection of necessity, of needing to visit the members of one's local community in order to get something done on one's personally relevant work, creates and sustains a relationship different from a work friendship or a purely social relationship: one that, although less personal, can become stronger than one where people only see each other out of intentional action.  And when these interconnections reach a critical mass, a different social fabric arises.

This year I rented the greenhouse of the retired farmers directly to the south, neighbors who I like and often chat with through the fence line. We've known each other for over a decade and are friends dedicated to supporting each others' farming, although as much as we'd like to see each other socially, we rarely do. But this year, in the course of going over to water my transplants each morning, I saw them more days than not and in passing we inevitably registered the briefest observation or complaint, talked about some happening, or asked some question we'd never think to call each other for "on purpose." Now that the greenhouse season is over we're no longer brought into contact by my transplants and my neighbors' morning gardening, and we see each other less. Eight or ten years ago—I remember this because I remember when it changed—people talked on the phone to ask even a quick question (if you can believe it!), because there was no other way. A call to sell some lettuce or to buy some tomatoes might last only a minute, maybe two...but there, several times a week—without even thinking about it—in the course of accomplishing our work we would hear something of the news of the day in each others lives, and thereby maintain our relationship through such frequent and mutually-necessary interaction. By now, texting has solidified as the norm: straight to the point, no need to answer the phone and spend 60 or even 90 seconds talking to one another; no need to hear another's voice or to chat without intention. This new mode is admittedly more efficient, but I do feel the loss of that connection that arises when people are forced by the necessity of their work to cross paths not for social reasons but simply in the course of living their daily livelihood.

I've mentioned here before how I enjoy building and repairing the old farm equipment I use on the farm. During the evenings, for the past month or two, I've been fixing up my farm shop—organizing tools and sorting out an overwhelming volume of auction lots haphazardly stacked, much of which came from Bill Moore the welder's sale last year, which had been, til recently, sitting as it came home including his enormous 1000lb drill press from 100 years ago or more (a $40 bid) sitting awkwardly in the middle of things where the tractor set it down. A farm shop well organized and ready for work is just on the horizon, in time for the winter season. It's true I am looking forward to enjoying time spent practicing out-of-date mechanical skills learned from old books, a sufficient reason to be sure, but in no small part I'm also setting up the place with a mind that I might come to make repairs now and then for others. In the practiced assessment and hand-work of making a repair there’s a joy entirely different from the work of creating a tomato, and in fact there's not all that many things that break on my own farm so it would be interesting to have access to a body of repair work greater than I can generate here on my own. But moreover, to be able to send neighbors away with something that was previously broken but now allows them to do something that they want to do in their daily lives, that activity brings people into contact with each other in that “old way of life," keeping relationships strong through the interactions that happen to occur because we're living in reliance on one another.

Last week I invited a neighbor from down the road to come see the progress I'd made on the shop—a friend I like though we rarely talk to because we're both busy, but of course the shop capability was interesting enough that they made a point to come over to see it. We talked at length about drills and vises, and ended up with a social visit to boot, where we never would have gotten together "on purpose." We farm-types certainly are intermingled with each other, but we're also often busy, often sequestered off on our own projects, too caught up in our own activity to think of a visit except by necessity. In a world moving on from such inefficiencies, it's possible I might be able to create some of those necessities, with old-school metal and mechanical ability.

Weather & Climate

Happy September! The light at the end of the tunnel after a long hot summer, with the first early winter squash this week as we head towards fall in the beautiful cooler weather at the end of summer.

JUST KIDDING, it’s above 95 degrees all week and time to talk about the weather. I accept these sorts of conditions in July, but, you know, at this point I’m over it—September is no time for this. In earlier years of the CSA I remember “the weather” being a fairly common topic of the weekly newsletters, but it doesn't end up coming up that often anymore. I think that's because the weekly weather used to have a critical, direct effect on the weekly work list—in particular rain and the week's rain forecast, which determined tillage timing and interrupted transplanting schedules with soggy fields. As the years went on, as we were exposed to more extreme weather situations, and as the weather patterns seemed to become more unusual (and weather forecasts less reliable), I made incremental changes to farm systems, crop plans, and decision-making principles so that farm operations became more resilient to these events—and so at this point, run-of-the-mill weekly weather barely affects our ability to get plants in the ground on time and has relatively little impact on the work list. It's also the case that with the longer periods of dryness between large rains these days, there just isn't rain often enough to get in the way of all that much.

And so “the weather,” that perennial farmer-favorite topic, rarely shows up in the weekly newsletter anymore. Because I know what to do about weather, which is to say, the various rainstorms, dry weeks, hot days, frosty nights, etc that all require certain decision making and work-list decisions to shepherd the farm to best effect. The bigger factor now, and what I do NOT yet know quite what to do about, is the climate—which is to say, the typical and expected weather patterns over time—and the major events a shifting climate can bring once a year, which still can determine the season's success.

Sometimes it feels like I'm just primed to see unexpected events as a product of shifting climate, where there in fact has always been surprising weather, and no year exactly like the last. But for us to have experienced all within the span of nine months: a shock of 5 degrees for 12 straight hours last Christmas, and then unseasonably warm conditions for the entire rest of the winter with barely a flake of snow, leading to a good percentage of the onion seedlings being eaten by onion maggots (their typical mid-spring timeline so accelerated by the warm winter that their emergence coincided with our ideal and unusually-early onion planting day of March 31st), and then biblical levels of potato beetles, weeks without rain followed by spring deluges of several inches turning the ground from “too dry to till” directly to “to wet to till”, and a parched summer with rain forecasts evaporating week by week, and days of wildfire smoke—a curiosity a couple years ago from west coast fires, but by now an accepted possibility, smoke visibly hanging in the air with no escape in a feeling reminiscent of the pandemic era, except in reverse, where indoors is the safe, un-masked location and masks are worn in the dangerous outdoor air. And now the hottest week of the year arrives, in September, a month that hasn't topped 97 degrees in my lifetime (at Dulles), and here we have three days in a row hotter than that. And of course, overall, this is the hottest year on record (which really has stopped being news; most years nowadays are the hottest on record.) Wells haven’t run dry and nothing’s on fire, but that just seems like more unusual events than there used to be in a year, and it's only September.

We’re doing all right with the weather this week (we know what to do this week when it's hot—the same as we do in July) and we're prepared to meet the challenges as the intensity of weather dials up and it comes to be more likely now to have major deluges followed by long periods of dryness, rather than reasonable amounts of rain at regular intervals. And then there is the increased and real risk of intense and unavoidable hailstorms that may in any given year track across the farm, for which there is no preparation—as happened in 2020, and will happen again. But in the big picture it’s not clear what the future brings, with the newly variable climate year-to-year an unknown challenge. We've experienced new possibilities of climate-related pest appearance not before imagined—and so we'll learn to cover the onions with netting, and introduce an organic spray for potato beetles, while changing the mix of potato varieties and planting density to have the best result in case of early death. Someday, to our great surprise, it will have been dry not for a few weeks, but for a few months, or more, and we'll wonder if (or when?) drought can become so extreme that our well runs dry. Now knowing wildfire smoke can arrive without warning, we will be ready with masks and air-quality protocol for hot-weather outdoor work, but there will likely be a summer when we see smoke-filled air not for a couple days, but for weeks on end, as already happens in other parts of the country. Not to mention the ways that a changing climate affects the larger infrastructure we rely on, like the electrical grid which suffers under demand during extreme weather and has gone down in other parts of the country. We already get our electricity from solar panels; do we invest in off-grid capability before or after experiencing an extended outage?

In the earlier years of the farm the moment-to-moment implementation of the farm consumed my decision making and efforts at improvement, working out what to do for situations that might arise weekly or monthly in years to come; now it seems like that planning turns more and more long term, making subtle changes to increase resilience as once-outlier events become more and more possible. The process for meeting future challenges is really the same one as has allowed the farm to come to where it is today in the first place—I mean, farming was never a straightforward uncomplicated enterprise—it's just that what's to come may involve new and unexpected challenges different from the one ones my neighbors here and I have all faced for years. As we've solved problems in the past, we'll meet future problems just the same.

What is the CSA, anyway? and, a concrete example...

What “IS” the CSA, anyway? You can read a lot of words on the website about what the CSA is, and my impression is that's a fairly accurate description. Still, everyone has to sign up in advance, based on that description and before they really know what they're signing up for. Rarely—and honestly less often than I would expect—someone interested in joining the CSA asks about a sample share or a trial week. I always consider it, and I always refuse. Not because it wouldn't be possible, but because I don't think one week can ever say all that much about what the CSA is. If anything, basing one's impression of the CSA on one isolated week would give a less accurate view of what to expect! Each week is different from the last, shifting slowly but surely through the season. I'm even disinclined to let people join the CSA partway through, even when there's space at the site, because, in some way, I feel like someone joining only for the second half of the season (tomatoes, peppers, winter squash) misses the context of what came before (zucchini, cucumbers, onions) and the change and growth over the course of the entire season. They might very well miss understanding the defining feature of the season, whatever it might be. The CSA is more than the sum of its parts, more than just one blue bag, which could be sampled in a trial week and then repeated 16 weeks in a row.

But in the bigger picture, is one whole CSA season even enough, to know what the CSA is? At this point, going on ten years running the CSA, the planting schedule and crop list is fairly nailed down with only minor adjustments each year. (For example, more tomatoes this year and hopefully a longer, less-intense melon season.) ...And yet, somehow, each season always develops its own character, unpredictably different from the year before. Some years it feels like a potato year, or a squash year, or a tomato year. Years ago there was even a beet year, which I was sure not to repeat once learning people's feelings on the matter. The funny thing is, these feelings about what the season was like (“too many beets!” “not enough tomatoes!” etc) are real, but they are just our impression, and often when I go back and look at actual numbers the seasons are, to my surprise, much more similar than they are different. The “reality” of what happened doesn't determine our impression of what the season was like.

Some years into developing my farm I heard from my neighbors, for whom I'd worked and learned to farm in the first place, that even they had winners and losers every year—and they'd been doing this for decades! That's just the way of it. Their farm always had enough overall, and approximately the same total quantity of vegetables each year, just not in the same proportions. I find that to be true for me too. I used to be concerned when a crop didn't seem to be working out, as if any given thing “should” work each year simply because it's worked in the past. And I didn't notice as much when certain things happened to be exceptional, because, well, maybe they “should” be like that every year. It took me a long time to get a sense of what a “typical” year is, and now I know that ALL of this is normal. We can't plan for what WILL happen in a given season, only for what is most LIKELY to happen, and, given enough seasons, will happen, on average, in time.

And so if someone were to join the CSA for just one season, does that tell them what the CSA is? They would certainly see a variety of different shares throughout the season, as you are this year, but it would be an error to assume each year is a repetition of the last. Sometimes I myself even worry about that, that as the farm plans become more similar year-to-year, the CSA might get boring for returning folks—and then I remember that my plans don't actually have the effect on the farm that I think they do, and so even if the plans are the same year to year, the farm never is!

To really get a sense of what the CSA is, I'd say one needs to experience not just one week, or one month, or even one whole season. As with farming, doing it for only a few years teaches a whole lot while still leaving one unprepared for year four, and it takes many more years than that to have experienced a breadth of situations to where everything that happens feels possible, normal, and with a ready answer for what to do about it. Similarly, for the CSA I'd say maybe 5 seasons is about right to REALLY know what the CSA is like, to understand the context for what might happen in any given year, and to feel that all the variation and surprises are well within the range of normal expectation given the experience of the prior years.

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Last week you heard about how every year of the CSA is, in some way, different from the last; some of you might have noticed by now that last year was a Potato Year, and this year most definitely is not! I have been parceling out potatoes a little bit at a time and only when necessary, not wanting to exhaust the supply before they become a critical item for fall shares. You see, although I did everything I was supposed to for the crop—as far as I knew—we had plague levels of potato beetles this year. Unheard-of numbers. And I thought, in fact, that we had been on top of it, looking for eggs to squash by hand and collecting the adults long before any larvae had yet appeared! Sure, some eggs did hatch, as always, and I figured the potatoes would outgrow them like usual... and then there were more potato beetles eating the plants, and I continued to trust my experience from prior years, which had not included such a comically unbelievable potato beetle situation, and, by the time I recognized that this year was NOT to be like any other, it was too late. Plants were eaten down to the nub. First in selected areas (surely the plants in the other rows will take off any minute now), and then across the entire patch. This is why your potatoes have been pretty small this year—that's all the potato the plants had time to make!

You can be sure I've been thinking all summer about what adjustments to make to avoid this situation in future years. On the other hand, the adjustments I'd made on account of LAST year's productive but very weedy potatoes didn't prove to be important. The bigger picture, here, is that potatoes are something planted only once a year. Lettuce, on the other hand, goes in the ground weekly; tomatoes and squash, 5 times, every year. I've grown plantings of those crops many, many more times than I've grown potatoes! And the systems for those crops, in response to all that experience, are pretty dialed-in. I've already made and then adjusted for the most common mistakes. But with potatoes (and onions, for that matter), it'll take decades to have as much experience with them as I have with tomatoes or cucumbers. In so many cases, one minor oversight or unusual situation results in, “Well, better luck next year.” And then, inevitably, some new combination of growing conditions will result in some new and unforeseen circumstance.

A farmer friend of mine, who goes to all the vegetable-grower conferences, once told me about a conference where a noted potato-grower spoke about how he did it. And he was sure to point out something to the effect of, “I've spent my entire career growing potatoes, and you're all looking to me to learn about how to grow them. But you have to understand.. I've only done this 30 times in my entire life!” How good can one get, in only 30 repetitions, each one in different climactic conditions? Over the same span, tomatoes would get planted 150 times, or lettuce, 500 times—now that's enough to get seriously proficient!

And this may be why farmers are a notably conservative bunch, in the sense of being resistant to change—whether new methods to combat climate change or new equipment to do the work better or faster, most farmers probably want to wait and pay close attention to how it works out for a neighbor before trying it themselves. Because even it it seems like an innovation “should” work out, a farmer who knows they've only done something 30 times knows that their lifetime of experience is insufficient to make the proper decision about an untested innovation, and therefore one must rely on principles and methods developed over a much longer timespan—and so knows that it's risky to deviate from the established custom: the best practices not of the last few years, but the last few generations.

Here on my farm, I've accepted that I'll always be better at tomatoes and cucumbers than at growing potatoes and onions. My experience with those can never hope to catch up. I accept the long term project, too, of incremental improvement year by year and the curiosity of seeing what happens in a new situation, and then waiting an entire year to make the one adjustment that might have fixed it (and which might, itself, cause other unforeseen issues—or might simply be irrelevant in the new year). The other factor at play here is that while I don't come from a farming family, I did learn from older farmer neighbors, bringing their far longer experience to bear. And those older farmers excel at the standard market crops I mentioned: tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, etc. Not one of them was any good at growing potatoes.

Bill Moore, the welder

Today is the anniversary of Bill Moore’s death last year at 63, of a heart attack. His family had kept Lovettsville area farms running for 100 years and his repairs, or his ideas, touched nearly every piece of machinery on my farm. Other writing about his life is further down on this same page.

I always do see Bill Moore with a hammer, when I drive by his shop in Lovettsville and remember what it was like for his roll-up door to be open, to turn and record the momentary image as the car passes of him bent over, arm raised, working on something with a blacksmith's hammer just inside the shadow of the building. Well—the memory is just that, that single frame compiled from the hundreds of times I drove past him there on the main road—the story my mind extracted from that shape of him, bent over, arm raised, is of hammering. It wasn't a hammer, though. That would have been his grandfather, swinging a hammer at a forge, or perhaps his father. Bill, he would have been reaching for the vice grips, or returning with the cutting torch, or flaking out welding cable for slack and more precision, or standing up to lift his visor to take a closer look before bending back for the next weld.

When I needed his skill for a repair for my own farm, or his take on a mechanical problem, I stopped and parked and walked down the short gravel driveway between the weeds and up to that shape of him, bent with work, until he stood, half surprised to see someone, curious what I brought. He always had an answer to my problem, but it often came sprinkled through a longer exposition, almost stream of consciousness, of interconnected recollections stuck end to end, relating in some way to the problem at hand. One time I came to seek his advice on a thermostat I was trying to repair, and came away with an accounting of mercury switches, how mercury was used in critical applications because being a liquid it wouldn't corrode. Surely that story came because mercury switches are often found in old thermostats, although I don't think he included that detail. Later on I noticed the thermostat in my old house had just such a switch, and I watched it in action.

His stories might have been of recent events only ten or twenty years ago, or from his time on the mobile welding truck in the peak of his career, or might comprise a profile of somebody recently died, though told through old anecdotes; and other subjects from time to time appearing (like the highway being built over in Maryland and all the work and machines that went into it or the Black school built with community funds against opposition from the local government) that seemed to be reported of his own experience but in fact turned out to be a recollection of events that occurred when he was a child, or long before his birth. All the same, he kept the record.

Any story, really, is about something that occurred in the past, but many of the people and all of the places his stories were about, they still exist—and in that way those stories to me were just stories of the current world, as all stories are a telling of what happened in the past to inform an understanding of a place, of a time, of an event. In this case, Bill Moore's stories were telling of the world he lived in—the town of Lovettsville and its surrounding activity. The field was right around here where the man had a heart attack by his tractor, where the pilots who worked for the airlines out of Dulles lived and flew their private planes and where one of them once took Bill up in a glider, where the man once planted his corn in a spiral for simpler cultivation, Bill's church up the road and the mechanical problems of an old building, the stories of his neighbors in the community: the honest, crooked, hard-working, or the self-important—who all happened (just by chance) to now be old and some already dead. I never saw a young man with work for Bill at his shop.

When I came to him I inevitably and without even trying, or noticing, brought something of this same world: to weld a new ball onto the tie rod of my little International Cub, designed in 1947, (I learned how International Harvester tested new equipment in the southern hemisphere's summer, to be ready for summer sales up here, before losing its global dominance to the 3-point hitch), or a broken sprocket from a McCormick grain drill from the 50s that needed a new tooth brazed on, or a disc tongue that had cracked from some farmer's poor repair long before I got it. Cleaning out the grease channels on a used disc I bought, with uncommon 7/16ths carriage bolts, Bill remarked that such bolts were often used on equipment built by Ford, in the 70s, and wasn't surprised when I told him it was, in fact, a Ford 201 disc.

These days as I drive south on the main road, through Lovettsville down towards my farm, I no longer look over and see Bill working in his shop. His bay door is closed, as if he's just away for the day, or it's after hours, and he'll be open later. He won't be open later. The grass is grown tall, now that he's not here to keep it mown on his tiny old riding mower. Instead I drive down the same road as ever but I don't see Bill and the world he described through his stories—though I still know which person built his own house and everything else before in his old age becoming obsessed with growing potatoes (never successfully) and from whose son I happened to buy a wagon frame after Bill sent me there looking for potato equipment; and how the traveling salesman (from whose catalog Bill's father bought a welder) helped a man start the business down the road, now run by his son; and how Lovettsville is all farms and Brunswick across the river is all railroad; and how the humble scrap man is more respected than the cabinetmaker who is industrious and highly skilled but thinks he's better than you. Instead of the world these stories are a part of I see the houses, and the new strip mall, all built over the last 20 years since developers discovered the flat, perfect farmland of Lovettsville was also perfect for houses, offering an amount of money no retiring farmer could refuse as fast roads came west and the suburbs grew from DC to connect isolated towns in the country into a continuous exurban expanse. The thousands of people who moved into those houses on every cornfield don't know of the hundreds who comprise a parallel world of activity—or who used to, anyway—and now it becomes difficult to reconstruct the connections, to feel the presence of that world anymore.

Thing is, that world was on its way out when Bill Moore was in his forties. Long before I knew him. Bill just never saw a need to change—he kept things mostly as they were in his father's day; even the rack of wooden tool handles still hung from the ceiling, from when the shop served as the local hardware store, ages ago. His stories too were probably just the same as ever, new ones added to the canon as they came up. He had something to share from the moment I walked up until long after the work was completed. Sometimes I looked for a pause where I might add a topical anecdote of my own, but I rarely found one; he needed to tell me what he needed to say.

On the final page of the classic memoir The Things They Carried, the author Tim O'Brien keeps people and place alive by making up stories, and writes of being dead as “like being inside a book that nobody's reading...the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hoping somebody'll pick it up and start reading.” Bill Moore seemed to live through stories, some recent, some from long ago, some incidental, some personal, but mostly just an accounting. Maybe he wasn't just keeping the record, or sharing it with me, but in the telling of it, he was keeping his world alive. For himself. Like a memory, whose neural connections have to be refreshed, if not gone over in recollection now and again, it fades. Without his stories keeping the threads knit together, his world would soon unravel. As it begins to for me, without him. He kept it alive as long as he lived, alive enough for me to feel it was real.

The lasting imprint of Germans & Jefferson on July 4th

I thought last week, for the Fourth of July, I might write something at least mildly patriotic while watching those fireworks blooming on the ridge. But it took me a week to nail down the idea—in this political time, to write anything on large-scale “patriotic” themes seems likely to feel divisive to one faction or another. The important point though is not the national politics and government, disagreeable to all in one way or another, but the small-scale patriotism of the local society in which we live our day-to-day lives. A patriotism of being proud and appreciative of that social fabric of schoolteachers, librarians, letter carriers, volunteer first-responders and the other connections of the community fabric, which I think (I hope!) might be more universally appreciated: to focus not on the greater concept of the Country, but on literally the country (as in country-side) in which we live.

Thomas Jefferson had a lot to say about lofty national ideals, but when it came right down to it, one of his core visions was of a country whose social fabric would be comprised of farmers—independent, self-sufficient, self-governing homesteads reliant on neither government nor employer, and therefore truly free to vote and act towards the best interest of the nation. (Even though the only people eligible to vote in the first decades after independence were those who owned land—and who were white and male.) This agrarian vision of the American Family Farm remains rooted in our national consciousness, showing up in children's books, the famous Fisher Price Farm, and in grocery-store (and pickup-truck) advertising. But at exactly the same time as young Jefferson was developing his agrarian perspective on the colonial plantations of the Virginia Piedmont, German immigrants were moving down from Pennsylvania into the flat fertile farmland here where I live between the ridges west of Leesburg...and down into all the hills and valleys of Virginia west of the Piedmont, in the Shenandoah Valley. Jefferson's plantation culture of the day was indeed one of self-sufficiency, each plantation essentially an outpost for the purpose of exporting profit back to England, a company large enough for all work to be done in-house—and mostly with enslaved labor, while somehow claiming the virtues of an agrarian moral high-ground. With no need for outside help from independent tradesmen or merchants, there was little need for towns, or for that matter, roads. Social connections developed from status; government, the same. Perhaps Jefferson imagined the virtues of agriculture remaining the same at any scale, with a modest homestead maintaining an equally self-sufficient lifestyle, as if the goals of a multinational corporation could be in any way compared to those of a small business in town. The German agrarian society worked in just about the opposite way—there was no social hierarchy, no aspiration to wealth, and no sense of self-sufficiency, but rather, community resilience and a focus towards modest, stable, agricultural livelihood. No one family's enterprise was large enough to employ their own tradesmen, and so there had to be independent blacksmiths, wheel-wrights, transportation businesses, and every other ancillary function the community needed to get by. In this way the German society was a society of equals, who, through their livelihood, were drawn into contact with each other—in towns, and along roads, and in the daily course of business—and so developed strong social ties, and an understanding that the success of the community as a whole relied on the success of one's neighbors, each person's livelihood reliant on the others'.

The imprints of these two agricultural societies—one based on large-scale agrarian virtue, a nation made up of independent and self-reliant farmsteads; the other based on small-scale agrarian relationships, a local community made up of interconnected economic activity—are still visible today, faintly but indelibly marked in the generational echoes of our past. For one thing these cultural differences between the Virginians and the Pennsylvanians caused Clarke County to split from Frederick County, to the west of here. But more locally, the dividing line is just as clear. To the north of me, the Lovettsville area has had a concentration of small-scale farm enterprises and support businesses for nearly 300 years, persisting long after people stopped speaking German and new families moved into what had been “The German Settlement”—as in “Those Germans Over There, In That Settlement.” Even as the individuals changed, the values and social norms persisted and the Lovettsville area remained a place where people knew who had what skill to offer, and where people were inclined to help a neighbor out of a jam. To the south, where the plantation-centered society set the culture, and then dissolved, there is not the same unbroken thread. I don't believe it can be a coincidence that every single plumber, electrician, builder, welder, hay salesman, machine repairman, fellow farmer, and “old-timer” I know around here happens to live to the north of me. Not a single one of these people lives to the south across Rt 9, even though the main town of Purcellville is down that way. I just can't believe that's all by chance, and not by history.

It doesn't seem that Jefferson's agrarian vision, scaled down, looks like the independence and self-sufficiency he imagined. From where I can see, the country of small farmers is an interconnected, inter-reliant one, as people necessarily are brought together in the course of their day-to-day livelihood, and that those small-scale economic connections of daily necessity bring about a robust social fabric of neighborly, community-minded relations. It's that way among the people I know in the farm world, at least. Relationships are kept up as an inevitable result of calls to buy and sell vegetables, inquiries of who to call for a repair, stories told and news shared while waiting in line or during a practical visit to somebody not seen in a long time. Even at the farmers market, the purest exercise of supply & demand economics, the farmers are competitors in name only. When I first worked here, for a vegetable farm selling at a dozen markets a week, it was clear that we were not competitors with our compatriot farms—we knew many of them, wished them well, lent equipment or workers to help out when necessary—we knew that the farmers market only thrived (and brought customers to our own stand) if each other vendor saw success. And in that way, we became woven into that fabric of our agricultural community, neighbors to all and friends with some, all engaged in the mutually understood “group project” we each recognized in the others: that of the success of our small-scale farm world.

The Groundhog(s)

Gardeners often ask questions of a farmer, thinking we must have surely solved all the home garden troubles they encounter, since we, from their perspective, can grow an even BIGGER garden. It turns out, though, that most of the gardener troubles seem to be unrelated to farming: we farmers are really good at organizing thousands of plants in a field, but we really don't know much about growing a few plants behind a house. I remember when I sold at farmers markets, with a big table of tomatoes laid out, people would often ask about squirrels eating their tomatoes at home, and did I have that problem, and what did I do about the squirrels? Well, the farm is actually comprised of...fields. So, there are no trees around, and, sorry, no squirrels.

One perennial frustration we DO share though, is protecting our lettuce from all the animals that would rather eat it. Colloquially, this would be bunnies. But although there are bunnies around here, it turns out they are largely benign—and very cute. I've never actually seen one eating lettuce, or any other crop (not even carrots). Deer are the major pest here, so much so that we all spend thousands of dollars and tear our hair out anyway trying to keep the deer out of the farm, so good are they at finding the one little hole or gap in the fence. They LOVE lettuce and are quite happy to take a little bit of lettuce every night until we farmers figure out how they're getting in. I've attempted to chase deer out of the fence and watched them enter a small patch of tall grass with no escape... but, after driving through the grassy patch to flush them out, discovered that they have positively disappeared. This year, though, the fence has been 100% all season—no deer in the early lettuce—and I thought I had it made.

I was wrong. This year, seeing the tasty buffet before them with nary a deer in sight, the groundhogs moved in. This is is a first! Groundhogs live all around here but I've never had trouble with them in the lettuce. In the greenhouse this year, many early lettuce transplants had already been munched down in their trays (no mice in mousetraps, no larger rodents in their traps, no deer inside the fence...could it have been birds?? I still have no idea what it was, although the eating has stopped), and, since those little plants went in the ground already a little eaten, it took me a minute to figure out what was going on. Every time I looked at the baby plants in the field, they still looked a little eaten... but they had *always* looked a little eaten so I didn't think a lot about it. Eventually though, I admitted that this was new damage.

There is a big groundhog hole near the lettuce patch, but since we'd never seen a ground hog dash towards it as we drove by, we assumed it was old and abandoned. Just to be sure, I kicked the excavated dirt back into the burrow to close it up. And, well, the next day it was open again. Somebody was living there. I got out the groundhog trap, and baited it with lettuce—the very lettuce they had been eating—and got lucky this first time. It only took the better part of an afternoon to catch it. Yet, the next day, there was fresh damage. I again went to kick in the dirt to close up the hole, and see if it would re-open, and this time, a groundhog was looking back at me from inside the hole, taunting me with its comical rodent buck teeth! I met its gaze and taunted it back, ineffectively. I reset the trap. Eventually I caught that groundhog, and then over the next couple weeks, two more out of the same hole. Now, finally, the hole has stayed closed after being covered with dirt: nobody home.

I've been planning to write this story to you for the Week 2 newsletter for a little while now. I planned a triumphant story of farmer besting the perennial foe. This evening, however, I walked down the aisle in the lettuce thinking about what to write and admiring the bushy new growth in a part of the row far from that groundhog hole—and then, WAIT, why is that one freshly eaten?? No deer prints. It must be a small animal, and I considered for a minute the bunnies, but then decided to take a look around the fenceline near that section of eaten lettuce, knowing that groundhogs rarely travel far from their burrow to dine. Sure enough, there was freshly dug dirt, standing out light brown against the green grass, and a hole down into the earth.

I reset the trap.

Entropy

We might think of farming as a natural system, in some way working with nature to grow those natural plants out there in the ground, left to their own devices and undisturbed by the “unnatural” pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. But the farm is an ordered, organized, linear, countable system created with effort towards a certain end—that is, tasty vegetables each week for you all. Natural systems are not arranged in this way; they don't take effort to maintain. Nature—which is to say “those woods out there,” the consequence of natural systems—is not the farm. And it always wins in the end.

Right now, towards the end of the season, the farm is a mess! It's almost embarrassing. Over the course of the season I put effort towards maintaining the crops that are in production, but as soon as their utility is on the wane we put our effort elsewhere, not wanting to do extra work just to keep that natural reclamation at bay. And without energy put in to weeding, mulching, and rowcovering, first the grass covers the spaces between plants, and the pigweeds grow tall from any square inch of soil exposed to sun, and before we know it there is no longer order. The mower restores some peace of mind, but only long enough to take up the drip tape, the tomato stakes, the fabric mulch, before nature finishes dismantling the agricultural order we had put so much effort into arranging.

If left even longer, for a year or two, woody perennials would arise, seemingly out of nowhere, as happens in unmowed meadows and under power line rights-of-way. Passing birds drop seeds, and, soon enough, a little seedling tree here and there. Eventually, without effort put in to mow the fields and maintain the farm, it would turn into forest. Indeed, a few dozen yards into forest that grows just off the west edge of the farm, lies an old fenceline—that fenceline is a memory of what at one point used to be the edge of the forest, which has since escaped its boundary, now held at bay only by the mower and the occasional chainsaw.

In physics, there is the idea of “entropy:” Everything under the sun and everywhere else inevitably tends toward disorganization, as the amount of energy available for work gets to be less and less over time. I'm sure I'm about to mis-apply the concept here because I'm not writing about some thermodynamic system, but that's okay—I'm no physicist either. The principle I take away is that it takes some energy to keep a particular biological system organized, and over time, disorder—entropy—rises as it seeks its natural equilibrium instead of the “unnatural” carefully ordered state. That natural state might be complex—look at the woods, and the cycles of plants growing, dying, being consumed by insects, bacteria, the fungi in the soil linking trees together in a web of biological communication – yet given this region's fundamental conditions it's the inevitable, characteristic result, absent any outside force.

The only reason there's a treeline by my field at all, of course, is that hundreds of years ago people put their energy towards clearing fields to farm, and it's only due to continued effort that they have remained clear and not reverted back to forest. People from elsewhere say this part of the country is beautiful, green and lush, and, as someone who grew up around here it's hard to appreciate: of course there are forests, of course there is undergrowth, of course highways are lined with trees and smaller gravel roads I drive near the farm are cut out from beneath the overhanging canopy of limbs. But this Mid-Atlantic hardwood forest is a product of our own climate, with four seasons and frequent rain. In another part of the country, the nature that would move in would be a product of that area's own climate and geology underlying its own natural system—the plains states, if left alone, would progress towards grassland. It's not that the area has never seen tree seeds, but that because of climate and geology and soil, trees just don't grow well there, apart from along the creekbeds. A forest of trees would take some effort to establish, and if left alone, would in time revert back to prairie.

And even our forest here—our characteristic Mid-Atlantic forest that grows by default without any particular attention—is itself changing rapidly. Recently I visited some friends nearby and we we walked through their woods. They noted the number of dead and fallen trees: all ash trees. When they moved here years ago, they told me, it was an elm forest. Once the elms died of Dutch Elm disease, it became an ash forest. It's only a matter of time until the last ash trees succumb to the emerald ash borer, and we don't know yet what will fill the space left by the departing ash. My old house is built of chestnut, whose original status as the dominant woodland species here is remembered only by its ubiquity in old buildings, barns, furniture, and how its nuts used to offer a subsistence living to people carving out their own ordered stability in the Shenandoah mountains.

Last January I drove up to Vermont to help a friend fell some trees to clear space for a building. Driving north through Pennsylvania, across into New York and up along the Hudson river, I looked for the transition out of my familiar, homey Mid-Atlantic hardwood forest. Even well into the Hudson valley, the roadside forest looked remarkably similar to what I'm used to around here. Finally, crossing east into Vermont, and with the Green Mountains on the horizon, I saw my first birch tree and soon enough, the ground became snow covered and the forests turned to birch and evergreen. Left to its own devices, nature had tended to create something different in response to different natural conditions.

I often think of Vermont as an agricultural state, with cows, Cabot cheese, and all the back-to-the-lander farming operations supplying fresh, fancy food to New York and Boston—and in fact I had gone up there in part to take a closer look at its rural, agricultural economy. The Hudson valley had been full of small farms, greenhouses, farmstands, but driving north through Vermont, it was only sawmills. I passed sawmills and firewood mills, little small-scale businesses, I passed logging trucks driving along the road—with hardly a farm to be seen. I can't tell you the last time I came across a sawmill here in VA, or passed a log truck on the road, but I can barely go anywhere around here without passing an agricultural operation of one sort or another. Just as with natural systems, the business enterprises that happen to do best as a result of an area's climate, geology, and economics are the ones that over time end up predominating.

The Loudoun Valley, where I am, has long been known for its good soil and agricultural promise—as opposed to the area east of the ridge, between Leesburg and Fairfax, which is remembered for its scrubby useless forest and poor soil. The thoroughly agricultural history of the valley here reflects that, as does the arrangement of farms—this area's rolling hills and creeks has made small-scale land-holding the predominate social arrangement, because unlike in the flat land to the south and west it would take too much work, too much energy, to have expansive plantations here.

My own, particular farm, as idiosyncratic as it is today, it too is shaped by the same forces of place, of geology, of climate, tending towards the low-energy state of this region's characteristic vegetable farming activity. I started off, in the beginning, growing the uncommon crops and storing root vegetables for sale over winter, because there was a better market for those items as a new farmer breaking in. The reason for that, of course, is that it takes more effort to grow spinach, carrots, and beets in this climate, and in this heavy soil. Those crops and that style of mechanized farming was not the characteristic operation well suited to this area. Indeed, I was copying systems familiar to the Northeast, which few people employ down here, to produce crops that were marketable precisely because few people grew them. I had learned to farm from my neighbors, but my farm didn't look anything like theirs.

As I farmed, year by year, making decisions about equipment, about crops and sales models, I tended (as anyone would) to drop the elements that were less successful, or less productive, or that I over time found to be less reliable than others. And as I adjusted towards what works best and grows most easily in this area, I can now look back over time to find that my farm, for some unseen reason, has less and less direct-seeded roots and greens, and more and more of the hot-season summer crops grown from transplants on plastic mulch. I realize that my farm is coming to look more and more like my neighboring vegetable farms I learned from in the beginning. Not because of any particular intention, or even awareness, but by following what produces with the least difficulty, the least energy. Which is, of course, what those other farmers had done, in their own day, regardless of their own interests, abilities, and skills—and they too happened to settle in to the same sort of farm that am being pulled toward today. Like any system in the world—in the universe, even—my farm can't resist the principles of entropy, bending towards the characteristic arrangement that arises with the least complexity, the least special intention.

Miracle of a mustard seed

Here's something I've had in my mind for a very long time, but not yet written about until now. Way back during my first year farming on my own—well, actually it was the fall before, a mini "trial season" of sorts where few things worked because I hadn't made enough mistakes yet to know what to do and not do—I was ready to plant my first crop: salad greens!

I'd seen the entire process and done every part of it as a worker on other people's farms, but it was my first time doing it all myself for my own farm. First I prepared the ground, as we always did, bringing the tractor to till up a patch of sod and find the soil underneath all those grass plants—just as, indeed, underneath every plant everywhere around here lies many feet of dirt, soil, ready to be turned from two-dimensional surface of the earth to three-dimensional space ready for useful activity: a field to plant in. I marked off rows and brought out my push seeder to help there become neat lines of new plants, useful to people, where there had been just weeds before. I poured in the round, hard, black orbs from a packet (quite literally they were "as small as a mustard seed"), ran the seeder back and forth straight as I could and just had to trust that those little seeds were dribbling down there, not too deep and not too shallow, being too small to even identify once covered with dirt.

After clearing those sod weeds, loosening the soil, and covering the tiny round kernels with the soil, I left, my work done. In three days I returned. Where there was nothing before but bare dirt, now there were visible faint lines of tiny mustard seedlings, each with its tender stem unfolding up and out of a crack in the seed up through the dirt, spreading into two-lobed seed leaves, and a little root pushing down into the soft earth. I had seen seeds before, of course—perhaps the first was in second grade, the bean seed in the paper towel, or perhaps before that the colorful marigolds in our flower garden at home, dying and drying to seed heads, surprising me with new marigolds the following summer sprouting up far from where we had planted them. I had planted thousands of seeds working for other people and tended the resulting crops. So now, off on my own, with my own field, my own seeder, my own seeds, I can't say I was surprised, as much as mystified, in the sense of beholding the mystery of what had happened.

Sure, through my own work, these plants had come into existence, for which I was responsible to grow and eventually (hopefully) sell, to support my own life. But how was it, really, that those seedlings came to be—that those seeds, seemingly inert for months or even years, at this particular moment had put forth plants? I didn't do that. Somehow, the seeds had done that. It felt as much a miracle as I had ever experienced.

With all our technology, with miniaturization, with all our science and engineering and "just add water!" hype, we can't come close—not even close—to making something that does anything near to what a little mustard seed can do. Just add water, something from nothing. I'm not sure we really even understand how it all works, though we know that it does. Some look to religion, for an answer in God; some find understanding in biology. Now and again someone from the CSA will offer an appreciative comment about how skilled I am at creating such good food or, from a religious perspective, how God has given me the skill of bringing food from the earth. And I appreciate the sentiment, I really do—but I know that it wasn't me who did the work of creating the vegetable. I don't have much of a hand in that. Somehow, it's the plants that did the job, that figured out how to create these things we eat. All I did was to spend my own day's work giving them the conditions necessary for them to do theirs.

Bill Moore, the welder

The news on the farm this time is more consequential than most. Bill Moore, the 3rd generation welder just up the road from me, passed away last week. His family kept Lovettsville area farms running for 100 years until his death, and his work tracked the development of farm machinery and farm land in this region. His repairs, or his ideas, touched nearly every piece of machinery on my farm, and without him my farm would not be as it is now. He was 63 years old.

Twelve years ago I was a young twenty-four-year-old trying out vegetable farming, and I had an idea for a mechanical seeding contraption to run behind an old 1950s Farmall Cub tractor. I needed somebody to build it before the season began. I was sent—of course—to Bill Moore, the welder. Unusually, I called him on the phone, since he was at home recovering from his heart attack, and he told me it's exactly the sort of thing he would love to do, but he'd need to stay out of the shop for another month or so. But he was happy to talk—of course—about the Cub tractor, and old-school machinery, and surely would have told me several of the stories of his own well-cared for Cub that I later heard him recount in his shop. He sent me to another local welder, with whom he'd gone to high school, who normally did an entirely different sort of metalwork but was helping people keep up and running while Bill was recovering. Later that season, with Bill back in the shop, he made me some clamps for a new cultivator setup, a design I later modeled my own work after, once I had learned to weld and began to build more of my own farming equipment.

No matter what I brought to him for repair or advice, Bill was always game to stop what he was doing to help the walk-up customer, whether it be a quick fix (“Five dollars”) or a discussion of design considerations told in stories of past machinery built, tried, broken. At that time there was almost always a line, a steady trickle of people stopping in to drop off, or pick up, according to the day of the week, or the weather. Bill never rushed through one person's work to wait on the next; mostly one person's appointment seemed to conclude when the next person walked up. I was never sure whether the work or the talk was the main purpose, and learned to block out at least 45 minutes for a visit to Bill Moore, most of that taken up with listening to Bill tell about mechanical history, local history, and his own family history, a deep repository—a catalog, really—of the activities, characters, relations, and deaths of the farm-based Lovettsville world. He remembered unnecessarily specific stories that even the people they were about had forgotten had ever happened. But of course, he had his old favorites: the one about the man who planted his corn in a spiral, cultivated his way around and around to the middle, then came back a couple weeks later with a can of gas and cultivated his way back out again (that was the first story I heard him tell to somebody else, that I had already heard), or others concerning the success or failure of an unusual idea (going bankrupt borrowing for a steam-powered thresher; industrial potato planting not earning more than to pay the freight, etc). And the humorous one about the new folks coming in from the city, the man who showed him a picture he took of something very exciting in his yard: “He had a photo of a deer. A deer!”

Bill Moore no doubt carried with him three generations of mechanical craftsmanship, but he wanted it understood that he hadn't just picked it all up from his father. “I learned from LOTS of people,” he impressed upon me, “I have a lot of books.” Bill developed the shop towards his own interest of practicing greater levels of craftsmanship, bringing in the mill, the lathe—even the press, a machine used every day—as new tools to access work his father didn't do, or to do the same work better. And he learned to use them—in fact the first thing made on the new lathe was a part to repair the new press. Other people, stopping in for a quick fix, might think that the machine does the work, but Bill he knew it was the craftsman. I made that mistake once, watching him cleanly melt a nut off of a bolt with a torch to fix my tillage disc, remarking in awe that the metal of the nut would just melt away from the bolt, leaving the threads intact. “You're not going to give me anything for skill?” I got his point. Like most people with high-level skill and knowledge, the layman can't appreciate even 10% of what's interesting to the craftsman. When I passed the standard welding test, I brought my bent pieces of metal to show him. Recognizing them immediately, Bill said I ought to be proud of my work and began describing his own time practicing at the Hobart welding school, perhaps glad to tell the story to someone who might understand something of what he was talking about, and would appreciate the skill he'd developed. “I still have all my own bend tests,” he said, “They're on a shelf in my basement.”

It was clear that Bill lived and breathed mechanical work, and I felt him to be so fortunate to have happened to grow up in his father's shop and to now be able to live his life walking down from his house every morning to do work he so clearly enjoyed—and then going back home to yet more mechanical projects. But like most people who work it was simply his profession, work which paid the bills and that he happened to be good at, and liked enough. And he understood that, at the most basic, he ran a customer-service business that played a vital role to the community of working people in the Lovettsville area—as had his father, and grandfather. People needed him to get back up and running, during haying, or harvest, or the snowplow season, and he prioritized his work according to how critical it would be to whomever needed his repair to get going again. He would tell me, as I stopped in to get his advice on some mechanical retrofit I was building, “I'm happy to help you, but I need to get a certain amount of work done,” gesturing to the repairs in progress around the shop, “And I don't know what might come in.” At first I thought he meant financially, that he needed to work a certain amount to make enough money, and of course offered to pay him for his time. But in fact he meant that he simply needed to get the work done, because other people were relying on him to do it.

Years ago, well before my time, in an era when the Lovettsville area was thoroughly a farming economy, and when now-outdated machinery was new technology, there was such call for the shop's services that they had a jig to set up a common repair on one particular part on the front wheel of one particular make of tricycle tractor. More recently, when I would stop in with a farm repair, there was no longer even a line at the shop. Bill would be able to talk for an hour or more without anyone arriving to interrupt. And the work had changed, too. “People bring me things that just aren't worth repairing, or aren't worth the time...and there's very little about it that's at all challenging, that tests my ability.” I remarked to him that his business these days seemed mostly to serve old people with old stuff—and, newly, landscapers and their trailers—which he confirmed was the case. The era of his work was coming to a close, as Lovettsville changed and his customer base aged. “Tractors and machinery just don't break down much anymore,” he explained, “And there just aren't many people around here anymore who are really farming.”

If he was becoming bored by his work, he was becoming more excited about the projects he maintained in his home shop, projects that to most people would appear indistinguishable from his “work” activities, but which as far as I can tell he spent nearly all his time on after closing up for the day. That is, when he wasn't sharpening chainsaw chains, or helping out at the church—or at an auction. He often talked about the precision lathe he was working on setting up at home, and the clocks he was repairing, and their mechanisms; he told me about having such a delightful Christmas morning last year, sitting at home on a Saturday finally getting a difficult clockwork back together, and how he'd got it running so cleanly that it had only lost so many seconds over a long period of time. He had a lifetime of projects to work on up at the house, and Bill was so looking forward to having time to sit down with them. To work on things that really interested him, to have time to execute the craftsmanship that he liked, to whatever level of precision he desired. His dream was to someday use that precision lathe to build a complete copy of an old but innovative Canadian-made clock. Bill Moore, not designing something new, but enjoying the use of his skill and knowledge in reworking something old.

Most weekends, Bill could be found at an auction. He loved attending auctions, and especially enjoyed showing off what he had bought for a song at the last sale. “Guess what this went for! … Five dollars!” A motor, welding leads, buckets of pipe fittings (“Oh, I'll use them all eventually, to make bushings.”) Once I learned to attend auctions as well I brought him my own stories to share, and useful things to show him, some of which he was happy to buy for a few dollars, or to trade for some minor work. One time I'd ended up with a box lot of about half a dozen old brace hand drills, not very serviceable, and he went right to the one with the rounded-out chuck, the worn shaft, the handle re-wound with soldered wire—an unusual repair for such a drill. “Oh my,” he said, taking in the record of the tool's life. “This one's seen a lot of love. I would be glad to have it.” I'm sure it's still somewhere up at his house, with all the other things he cared about.

One more piece on Bill Moore — fiction writing on the topic of his upcoming auction, at which I ended up buying, among many, many other things, an old worn hand drill and some bent pieces of metal.

A Visit to Bill Moore

November 30, 2022

“I went to an auction last Saturday.” He pointed to something just over there, asking, “How much do you think I bought that for?” He waited for my guess, which was too high, as usual. “A dollar!” I acknowledged the good buy. “It was a great sale. You know, I go to a sale every weekend, somewhere or another. Even if I don't come away with anything, I just love going to an auction.” I nodded; that much was clear. “There used to be so many more auctions around here, back when there were more farms—somebody was always retiring, or dying, and having a sale.” I noted the bluntness of his description of the way of the world. “Well, that's how it works. People collect what they need over their life, and then when they no longer need it, it's dispersed to whoever can make use of it for their own lives.”

“There's a sale coming up in December—I'm not going to be able to go to it though. I wish I could, but I can't make it. It's going to be a really good one. Cochran's doing it. This man's family had a welding shop for at least 100 years—well, it was a blacksmith shop first—the two of them, with him on the truck and his father in the shop, they did work for just about everyone around here, kept everyone going. I mean, the machinery people needed in those days, to get their work done. Of course, that was back when this was truly an agricultural area, everywhere around here. There's hardly anybody who's really farming anymore, and things just don't break down the way they used to. He could repair anything, or make it from scratch—few people appreciated his skill, but me, I knew what he was capable of. It's been a while, though, since anything came through the shop that really tested his ability, not for a long time.”

“Well, I guess he'd finished up his work for the day, closed up the shop like usual, and walked on home—he lived just up the street, between his shop and the church—apparently he got as far as taking his shoes off and sitting down to rest by the television. Had a heart attack. Robert Jackson, actually, went to check on him since he didn't come down to open the shop the next morning—it's sort of a funny story—Robert called 911 when nobody answered the door, and the dispatcher said all the officers were busy, and someone would be there in a few hours. A few hours! So he called our friend who lives just north of town, he's an officer, and he had two police cars over to his house before Robert even hung up the phone. The TV was still on when they found him. No two ways about it, he had a heart attack and that was that. I mean, that was the end of him. He just—died.

He stood silent and shook his head for a moment, considering.

“He was 63 years old.” I didn't know whether to be surprised, or whether that was just a statement of fact. “Well, he was. His father lived to be 90, and his mother, she lived to be 92!” I raised my eyebrows. “Well, nobody knows how long he's got left. That's just how old I am now, 63.” I already knew his age, always surprised to hear he's so young. “One time Robert Jackson and I—you know him?” I nodded. “Well he and I'll often go to a sale together, and one time I was off looking at something or another and Robert was talking with someone, who must have seen me off in the distance, and he says to Robert, 'Look at that man work, over there, why, he must be 80!' And Robert shouts to me, 'Bill!' I was some distance away, you know. 'Bill! This man here thinks you're 80!' Well I stopped what I was doing and shouted back to him, 'I've never seen an 80-year-old work like this!'” I smiled. “Well, that's what I said to him.”

“I'm not as young as I used to be, everything's gotten heavier, and in the winter, the cold just comes up from the floor, but I can still get done everything I need to. Well, I can. I'm only 63, you know.” I nodded. “My father, he lived to be pretty old, older than a lot of people. But he lost his mind. To know how much my father knew, what he could accomplish—to look at him, you'd never guess what he was capable of. But like I say, he just got to where he was completely demented, lost his entire mind. Now that's a sorry way to go. That's a sorry way to go.”

“Anyway this sale, like I said I can't go to it, but it'll be a good one, a two-day sale, the first two Thursdays in December—you can look it up. Sort of unusual timing. But anyway one day will be in the shop, you know, what everybody saw driving past on the road, and the other day up at the house—had a whole other shop up at home, to work on his own projects...nevermind the amount of safes, guns, clocks. He just loved anything mechanical.”

“Cochran's listing says of him, by way of talking up the sale, you know—'He could do just about anything for anyone.' Now, they'll say that sort of thing about any number of people, but this man—now, I knew him—and that's an accurate description.” I nodded. “Well, it is.”

“There's going to be a couple welders—I mean, real welders—a precision lathe, like that you could use to make a clock, a great press, all manner of tools...everything, and I mean, everything. Really, there's probably everything there I'd ever need for the rest of my life.”

“Oh, it'll be a good sale. I'm real sorry I won't be able to go.”

"Perfect" is not a standard

Back in the 70s, well before my time, a neighboring orchardist happened to be a NASA engineer. He packed peaches at night, and by day he dealt with the high precision and tightly controlled NASA tolerances required to build rockets. From time to time he would be called upon to give his engineer's take on a neighbor's idea for some home-built farm hack job construction, and came his reply: “Well, meets farm tolerance.”

Everything in the world has a tolerance, a range of acceptability. The only "perfect" to be had is a concept in one's own mind, and, when executing work in the real world, everyone has to decide their level of tolerance for their own work—decide what is “good enough.” Nearly everything done inevitably could have been done to a higher degree, and, while there is an infinite amount of perfection to refine towards, there is always a finite amount of effort, time, or money. When not warranted, excess perfection is a waste of effort (or money or time)--when trying to produce something, the needlessly superior result is in fact a worse job done.

Last winter, I re-did the tiny kitchen in my wonky old house that has no parallel walls and uneven floors—not a 90-degree angle to be found in the whole building. I needed to build a frame for a new granite countertop, and, although I could operate the tools and design the concept and execute the work, I didn't know how level is level or how true is true enough for an inflexible, brittle slab of granite. Chatting with the plumber I expressed my uncertainty and concern about whether I had built it perfect enough, and he told me that, in the real world, every countertop he'd ever seen used shims to make up for variation in the cabinetry. Well, the installers came with the countertop, I sweat, crossed my fingers. They didn't need to use a single shim. In my inexperience, I built it perfect. I was excited to have reached the precision I had aspired to...but in the end, watching the tradesmen work, I learned that such close tolerances just didn't matter. I hadn't done all that perfect a job after all.

So in farming, especially with its endless supply of work to be done and the limits of daylight and human energy, there is a sweet-spot trade off of perfection and speed. The gardener can spend all the time they want pulling every last weed or carefully tamping down every little transplant, but on the farm... we just don't have time for that. I think of “farm perfect” as about 80% of what the attentive gardener might do, and I describe it that way to prospective employees: How do you feel about leaving some little weeds that don't matter in order to move through the work expeditiously? Or about stuffing lettuce plants into the ground to let them fend for themselves, even though a few won't make it, because we have 1000 plants to move through and it just doesn't matter? I've learned that some people are perfectionists who can't bear to leave anything to a lesser degree than they are capable of, while others are slap-dash speed demons who do sloppy work (albeit quickly). The trick is to develop a close tolerance for what is neither too slow and careful nor too fast and sloppy—to dial in and reliably execute the precision of that perfectly imperfect “farm tolerance.”

The real skill, in doing work, is not knowing how to execute a job as perfectly as it CAN be done, but knowing how good it OUGHT to be done. And, unlike with home carpentry, I have enough experience farming to have a clear perspective on where that standard lies at each point in the season. These last few years it's been a delight to dial it in, to be able to perceive higher tolerances and reliably execute the work to that standard. Whereas a new worker can hardly tell one squash from the next, and so must have a wider tolerance, having picked and sorted thousands of zucchini and cucumbers and handled tons of tomatoes, each one looks different to me. And as the last person who sees the vegetables before you do, it's up to me to keep standards high, assessing which are the small-seeded cucumbers, finding the sufficiently unblemished tomatoes. Most that get packed into the CSA are perfectly good-enough, although I can see their flaws, but it's a true joy to recognize that rare “perfect” specimen, the outlier of form and beauty, or to appreciate picking lettuce in ideal conditions as opposed to the normal lettuce I cut day in and day out. And these standards aren't an absolute, but are assessed in response to a natural system in all its variation over the course of the season, over the life of a plant. Those tomatoes look nice now, but as the season progresses and the plants inevitably decline, they might not look so pretty as these first weeks—but we still want to eat tomatoes, and so a new standard is found, appropriate to the new conditions on the ground. (And, take your lettuce this week—considering it was hotter than 90 degrees all last week, it's all right! ...But there's no way it's as good as what could be grown in the cooler weather of June.)

It's not that everything IS perfect this year—far from it. Surely there are as many mistakes as ever, and just as much that I want to do better next season. But each year, the errors and imprecision come within a smaller and smaller margin. There is still plenty to improve on the farm, even though most everything so far has gone perfectly acceptably this year. Of course, like the workers who can't tell one squash from the next, my work this year is only “acceptable” to what I can see, to where my current standards lie. Perfection being always just out of reach, the new possibility for improvement is only apparent once having reached a certain level—and the “acceptable” standard rises accordingly. I can work on a level of precision of execution of the farm season that I couldn't even perceive in the past, and for those of you with a long-term perspective on the CSA (and a good memory) I think that might come through for you as well. In any case, the farm and CSA this year is leaps and bounds beyond what I could imagine even five years ago. Five years from now, the CSA will have evolved even further and I will have reached a new, and different level of perfection. The inevitability of adaptation towards that perfect season we can conceive of yet never will reach keeps us working towards that illusive perfection, and also satisfied in the limitations of our current moment.

Culture, history, identity

When I first worked on a vegetable farm back in 2005, the farmers often talked to us about the growing practices used on the farm. We sold at a dozen DC-area farmers markets each week, with our tent signage proudly displaying, in brief, our farm identity:
 

NO PESTICIDES
NO HERBICIDES
NO FUNGICIDES

It was clear to us that nearly all of the other produce growers were conventional farmers, using chemical pesticides and fungicides as a key element of their vegetable-growing system. And it was just as clear to us that many customers sought out our sign when choosing which farm to buy from. We workers each went to market once or twice a week, and at every market customers would ask, upon entering our tent, “Are you Organic?” We'd begin our reply, “We're not Certified Organic but we use no pesticides, no herbicides, no fungicides, and use a foliar fertilizer sprayed on the leaves that has no runoff issue and is FDA certified as a...” “Oh yes, that's what I mean—thanks!”

Back in the 90s, long before I worked there and long before anyone was asking for Organic, the farmers realized that customers were interested in this simple description of growing practices and put the sign up, a sign that remained unchanged even as Organic went mainstream. The constant interface of our farm with other farms at market—and with customers—reinforced to us what our farm was and how it differed from the conventional farms, creating a strong cultural identity based around using ecological growing practices while not being Certified Organic—indeed, there were very few Certified Organic farms at the farmers market in those days.

When I started my own farm, I stayed close to the growing practices familiar to me as a worker. But I moved away from farmers markets towards CSA, where I no longer see other farmers each week or talk with customers at market, so I hardly think about my growing practices anymore—they're just, to me, normal.

But growing practices are still important, and maybe even a key reason you chose to join this CSA (I hope so!). It's worth taking a moment to make the point that virtually all farms—whether in big agriculture, or farmers markets, or even CSA farms—who don't advertise their growing practices farm in a way that is reliant on the inputs of conventional chemical pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and fertilizers. And for that matter, virtually all Certified Organic farms are similarly reliant on pesticides, fungicides, and fertilizers selected from the USDA's Organic-approved list.

This farm uses no pesticides of any type, instead excluding bugs with netting and fabric cover, or hand-picking them from the plants. To combat fungal disease I plant resistant varieties, or make multiple plantings knowing the older plants will eventually succumb. Weeds are blocked with biodegradable plastic mulch (which, incidentally, is not approved for use on Organic farms even though it is 100% biodegradable, and so Organic farms instead use miles of regular plastic mulch that goes straight to the landfill or is burned). I do think my growing practices are objectively better for the world than the practices of conventional farming—and, for that matter, than the average Certified Organic farm. Moreover, I'd advocate for the principle of less reliance on off-farm inputs over a farming system based on the products of industrial agriculture.

But if you'd ask my why I use these specific methods, as opposed to some other set of environmentally sane methods, it's not like I've made a rational assessment of the options and come to the conclusion that my assortment of methods is the ecologically superior farming practice. (It could actually be argued that a system where the soil is never disturbed and weeds are killed with herbicide may very well be “better” environmentally than a system like mine that is reliant on frequent mechanical tillage—never mind those cutting-edge farms now working out new methods of doing no-till farming without herbicides, a farming system that may someday become the new “sustainable” standard.) No, the underlying reason that I farm in this specific way is just that: it's just the way I do it. Culture, history, identity.

As in any farming community, I learned to farm through working for the older generation of farmers (or “hippie farmers” as their neighbors called them), receiving principles and values passed down through cultural lineage, ready answers serving as a guide for all future decisions. No pesticides, use rowcover, keep planting, don't till when wet, sell everything, buy used, avoid debt, work hard in the summer, because then there's winter. Cultural restrictions are inherently limiting (What plant disease is this? No idea, won't do anything about it anyway), always in tension with new ideas (it used to be “Kill your rototiller” and now it's “Don't till ever”), but hopefully change over time to meet the future. The point, after all, is not so much to find the "right" answer but to maintain a sense of cultural- and self-identity as the world changes.

As keenly as I feel my farming perspective guide my farming decisions, I don't claim to have the “right” way to farm along sustainable, ecological lines. I just have one that works for me. There are surely things I would be happy to do on my farm if only I had learned to farm that way, just as sure as there are things I would reject except that I happened to “grow up with them” when I was learning. To be sure, the growing practices I employ and advertise to the world do aim to further sustainable ecological farming. And since you've joined this CSA, chances are you also value those same things. At the end of the day though, the reason I do these particular things on the farm is the same reason most of us live our lives as we do: that to do otherwise would be to compromise an inherent part of our history, our community values, our identity.

Do you think of vegetables as being alive?

Most of us intuitively think of cutting a plant down, cutting off a branch, or digging up a root as separating that excised piece from the live part of the plant, and it's only a matter of time until the piece withers and dies. A lettuce leaf, once cut, can't recover and the head will grow no more--and the forgotten summer tomato quickly melts on the counter leaving behind only its finished product: the seeds.

But other vegetables are quite different... not dead and done, but alive, waiting. Their cells are respiring, warding off rot for months at a time until the warmth of spring arrives to move some collection of cells to action. From that mass grows a shoot, a leaf, and soon, a plant. We're all familiar with this from potatoes sprouting on the kitchen counter, and it isn't so inconceivable that some structure on a potato (the eyes) knows how to grow into a plant. What astonishes me every year though, is onions.

Onions seem complete, dead tops and paper-skinned. They seem to follow the familiar course from vibrancy to death, the way a winter squash plant grows and dies to leave behind the butternut. Every year, though, there are inevitably some odd onions left over somewhere on the farm—unsaleable, half-rotten culls left in a shed, some tiny onions in the cooler—all of which freeze and thaw and freeze again throughout the depths of winter, and seem entirely inanimate, if not decomposing. But then in spring, there they are—onion shoots wending their way towards the sun! In the fridge at home too, every year a delightful, almost comical, surprise—onions trying to grow their way out of their paper bag, out of the fridge, inevitably becoming the first fresh leafy green vegetables of the new year.

Somehow, pulled from the ground for nine months, frozen over winter, left without any care in conditions that would kill any other vegetable, each one of those cells knows what to do when the time comes. Each layer of onion is indistinguishable from the next, no kernel or germ in the center, it’s onion all the way through and yet: they know to divide, to build a green shoot entirely different from what was there before, and, as it grows, it consumes the energy stored over winter in the eatable onion, leaving it a withered husk as the new plant grows tall. It's exactly the inverse of what's happening with these onions right now: the onion leaves growing in the field put energy into the bulb and will decline and die as the bulb expands. The onion we eat isn't an end-point, but a mid-point. It's no surprise then that these are the vegetables that store the longest: onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots. Rather than being dead and finished with their life cycle, they're just in a holding pattern biding their time until the next phase.

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween this week! Carving pumpkins don't make it into the CSA lineup owing to their inedibility, though they might be one of the most season-specific items out there! I'm sure you'll be seeing them all over town this week as we approach Halloween. This tradition began with the pagan holiday of Samhain, marking the beginning of the dark half the year at the midway point between autumn equinox and the winter solstice, and its Christian counterpart, Halloween. Both holidays honor the deceased and involve the passage of spirits and ghosts from one realm to another. To ward away evil spirits, people practicing folk Christianity in the British Isles carved large turnips and beets into grotesque lanterns lit with lumps of coal, and, in the 19th century, Irish immigrants to this country found American pumpkins to be well suited to the tradition. Soon enough what we think of as “Halloween” began to be celebrated across the country, with carved jack-o'-lanterns set out on porches decorated with dried cornstalks and gourds.

It's no coincidence that pumpkins, potatoes, butternut squash, and other root vegetables are what we decorate with and eat during October and November—and that these are the traditional vegetables of Thanksgiving dinner. These are the vegetables that were stockpiled for winter in the root cellar, before the advent of easy shipping and the modern industrial food system; in a very real way, these are the vegetables that kept people alive during the dark half of the year. Drawing much of our cultural touchstones from regions with long winters, it is no surprise that they are so encoded in our cultural memory.

The fact that these vegetables in particular are our seasonal favorites is simply a product of the principle of evolution—everything developing its niche to succeed; to every thing, its own season. These fall vegetables are produced by frost-tender plants that have all figured out a way to use the sun's energy from the year's growing season to persist in some way over winter to get a head start next year—potatoes with their starchy tubers sending up shoots when the soil warms; turnips, beets, and carrots ready to sprout a seedstalk first thing in spring. These same strategies allow us to keep them over winter for food; the stored energy nourishing us humans instead of growing a new plant next year.

Cabbage and the other hardy brassica greens are also considered traditional fall vegetables because they grow well in cool weather and do keep a while over winter. However, this cultural memory doesn't account for the fact that different types of plants are at home in different climatic regions (take brussels sprouts, which only taste good when grown in cold climates, yet have made it onto Thanksgiving menus nationwide). There's a reason tomatoes are a big deal around here; likewise, New York and Wisconsin are major cabbage growing areas.

Although most plants CAN be grown in most places, different types of plants thrive in the types of weather patterns found in specific regions at specific times of year. The more out-of-season or the less ideal the growing conditions, the more attention required to keep the plant in its comfortable conditions and the more easily they are knocked off course by weather outside of their comfortable range. Tomatoes and peppers, they just grow here in Virginia's heat, no special attention required; same for the fall crops like squash, potatoes, and sweet potatoes, since they to do all their growing in the heat of the summer. Cabbage and greens, on the other hand, really would love to grow in New York, with a mild summer and long, beautiful fall. Here we get a blazing hot summer followed by a short period of nice October weather quickly becoming too cold and dark for plants to grow. And how many emails have I written over the years about waiting for the exact conditions to seed spinach or the trials and tribulations of growing carrots? They definitely CAN be grown here, and we have had amazing spinach or carrot seasons, but being ill-suited to Virginian conditions it takes some effort and attention to guide them through the times when weather just isn't what they're expecting. I'd say about half the years see reasonable success; and the other years, slim pickings or outright failure. In any case, these are not the crops that we rely on to get us through the lean times.

So as we are immersed in the pumpkin spice everything season, with gourds and winter squash turning up in every major supermarket, and as you get ready to carve those pumpkins, rest assured! You are not participating in the fad of the season. Quite the opposite—you are celebrating culture tied to the botanical world that sustains our lives.

Sliding Scale Report

You may remember from way back in January that the CSA has a sliding-scale pricing option. This allows people to elect to pay more than retail price in order to directly offset the cost of CSA vegetables for people who would otherwise be unable to access this healthy, well-grown food. More broadly, it is also a way for everyone involved with the CSA to engage with these ideas, whether or not they decided to pay more (and I do not keep track!). We're now in the third year of offering the sliding scale option, and, much to my surprise, not one person has ever inquired about what actually happened with the money paid extra. Thank you for your trust and all, but still I'd like to take a moment to tell you about it this year―as every year.

As I described the situation on the website: It's a reality that our country's food system maintains low prices through environmental degradation, worker exploitation, and government programs; that subsidy and regulation favor processed food designed to sell rather than to nourish; that access to fresh healthy food is difficult for those without the financial security and education to buy it; and that wealth is largely a product of the possibilities afforded by our parents' socioeconomic situation and our education―simply, of our access to opportunity.

On one level, the sliding scale is simply a way for someone to elect to price the CSA slightly differently depending on their present income. But, at a deeper level, the purpose of the sliding scale is to create a way to engage with historical disadvantage. While I didn't make a big deal on the website about linking the sliding scale idea to our history of racial inequality (since I know not everyone holds the same narrative on this topic), it is clear to me that in America generational access to opportunity and financial power is in large part based on race. This article in The Atlantic described how this familiar story played out for farming: from black land ownership, to white land ownership, to―in fact―corporate land ownership.

This year I joined forces with my neighbor Potomac Vegetable Farms, who had been inspired to start their own sliding scale model, to combine the driving and logistics work (one of the trickiest aspects, to be honest) and bring vegetables from both of our farms out to a community in southwest DC. Every Monday I set out 12 share's worth of vegetables to be picked up by PVF, and the next day it's driven into DC to the same apartment community we've been sending the sliding-scale vegetables to since the beginning. In fact, the person hired to do the driving is the person who knew that area and found the community in the first place. An organizer who lives there receives the vegetables and they're distributed to the folks who live in the building―elderly people first―and some weeks they say as many as 75 families will see at least a few of the CSA vegetables. All look forward to the weekly vegetables and appreciate the opportunity to cook with this food and be a part of the CSA deliveries.

When I began the sliding scale three years ago, I felt it was one of my bigger risks in my CSA design, forcing everyone to at least see and click through the information about it. But it has proven itself to be overwhelmingly successful. Thanks to everyone who engaged--whatever your personal decisions or thoughts on the matter--and thanks for truly being Community Supported Agriculture members.

What is "Organic" on this sort of farm?

When I first worked on a vegetable farm back in 2005, we sold at dozen DC-area farmers markets each week with our tent proudly displaying, in brief, our farm identity:

NO PESTICIDES
NO HERBICIDES
NO FUNGICIDES

Sure, they used baking soda to ward off fungus on melons, and, in later years, a natural enzyme to prevent caterpillars from eating their crops, but the meaning was clear: we farmed without chemicals.

This simple sign differentiated our farm—in the 90s and until the farmers retired in the aughts (and later began renting to me, incidentally)—from how all the "regular" conventional farms grew: with plenty of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides as an integral part of their farming systems. At market we spoke with customers one-on-one and answered their questions about how our food was grown. Often people would ask, before committing to set foot under our tent, "Are you organic?" and we'd reply, "Well we aren't Certified Organic but we don't use any pesticides, herb—" "OH, of course, that's what I mean! Wonderful." We were one of the few farms of that type at the market, and we were the market stand they were looking for. I can't remember anybody ever being disappointed and leaving to go find a Certified Organic farm. This was, of course, at a time before Certified Organic vegetables were sold at Wal-Mart, before major brands had bought out the small, trusted Organic brands, before there was mass marketing of "natural" and "safe" food that met no industry standards, and before Certified Organic food became ubiquitous enough for customers to seek it out by name. At that time, organic was simply a shorthand people used to ask whether we spray stuff on the vegetables.

But as farmers markets multiplied across the country and Whole Foods became a household name, interest in organic food caught fire and the large-scale players in the food industry took notice, followed the money, and got to work developing the full line of Certified Organic products found in nearly every grocery store today. Many people think the Organic label means it was grown without any pesticides or herbicides at all, viewing Organic certification as an ideal reached by small, forward-thinking, maybe even 'hip', farms that are trying to do right for environment. Perhaps it was that way when organic food was a niche movement out of Berkeley in the 70s, but governmental regulatory standards are meant for the major economic players, and USDA Organic Standards are no different. As in any industry, big businesses try to do the least that they can while still complying with the rule, all the while working from the inside to alter the regulatory standards to be more favorable to their own interests.

Today, all that USDA Organic Certification actually means is that food was produced only with inputs listed on the Organic Approved List. While the ubiquity of Organic food is a big win in principle for the original organic farming activists, certification doesn't have anything to do with a farm's growing principles or actual environmental impact—the very principles that customers, not to mention the original organic farmers, are most concerned about. There are plenty of pesticides and fungicides on the approved list, and most Certified Organic farms use plenty of pesticides and fungicides as an integral part of their farming systems—they just happen to be from organic sources. And many products are completely safe yet not included on the list. I use a biodegradeable plastic mulch to block weeds, but since it includes an ingredient made from oil it isn't allowed (Certified Organic farmers use miles of regular plastic and just throw it away). The Organic regulation serves a critical purpose in providing an economic reason for agribusiness to use less-destructive methods, and when you buy from big business, I do hope you look for the USDA Organic label.

But for me, I use the same growing practices as those farmers I learned from: NO PESTICIDES, NO HERBICIDES, NO FUNGICIDES, not even the organic ones (apart from the occasional anti-caterpillar enzyme). As a small, local farmer that does care about the principles of low-input, environmentally-sane agriculture, trying to communicate those principles and methods with a governmental regulatory label meant for industrial-scale farms selling in a national market has never made sense to me.

Thankfully, I can talk to you all directly rather than referring you to a third-party certification. When you buy from local farmers like me, I hope you talk with them about what you care about, rather than finding meaning in the Organic regulatory label. Over the last decade, the more Organic products became ubiquitous in national supermarkets, with USDA Organic products from industrial-scale food producers on every grocery store shelf, the more customers began to demand that label in their local farmers market and other small-business settings as well. It is a triumph of the small activist organic farms that the big players have been turned to growing some food with Organic methods (even though Organic food comprises not even 6% of national food sales), but when this increasing customer demand for the USDA Organic label drives small direct-marketing farmers to grow and sell under the same rules as the industrial players, certifying under a program guided by and most appropriate for big business, agribusiness has won at our own game. This is why I am not Certified Organic, and why I encourage you not to care about such labeling when buying food from people like me. In choosing to sign up for this CSA—whether just last year or many years ago—I appreciate that you read the information on the farm website, asked me any questions that were important to you, and decided that my un-certified, old-school, somewhat-contrary farm is the sort of farm you're looking for!

Old-School Weather

Most years I write about the weather from time to time, except this year it hasn't come up as often. Perhaps that is because this summer we've only had two periods of weather: HOT & DRY and now, COOL & WET. The dry period sort of snuck up because it didn't quite feel like it was never raining. Rain was very often in the forecast, and that threat of rain very often determined the worklist on the farm. But every time rain was predicted, the skies darkening promisingly, the small storms missed us out here and then bloomed into giant thunderstorms by the time they reached the city. The ground got drier and drier, limiting tillage, until I gave up hoping for rain and assembled the overhead sprinklers in an unplanted field just to get the ground into a condition where it might eventually be able to grow something.

And yet last week I went up the road to visit the local welder, who in conversation about the weather (an obligatory topic), noted how well his neighbor's soybeans are doing next to the shop. He mentioned getting consistent rain, much to my surprise, but I knew what he was going to tell me next because he'd told me about it before: "It's just like back in the 70s when there were a number of great growing years..." He went on to describe this year's storms all coming up from the south, dropping just the right amount of rain... And I went on to describe how, yes, I know those rainstorms well... I watch them skirt my farm to the north and head right up here to you!

My neighbors, from whom I learned to farm and now retired after growing vegetables here since the 70s, often mention that back then a storm came through just about every week to drop an inch of rain, the perfect amount. They didn't even use irrigation until the 90s, the rain being so reliable. But weather patterns are changing. For example, every year there is usually 5 days of cool and rainy weather during the first part of August; I watch the forecast closely, for this is the fleeting window to sow spinach seeds in the ground. This year the cooler period came right on schedule...but with no rain in sight, I waited until the next window of good spinach-planting weather: a true rainy week towards the end of August, too late to re-plant if it didn't come up well. I had high hopes given that week's rainy forecast, but, as it turned out, that week kicked off these last 4 weeks of rain (pretty much every Wednesday, like clockwork, and on other days as well), which turned out to be too MUCH rain for the tiny spinach, many of which didn't survive germination. The survivors are fine, there just aren't as many as I'd hoped.

Sure, all weather is local and no trend predicts the weather at any particular spot at any particular time, as the welder's quite different growing season indicates, his shop being not 5 miles north of me. But old timers talk how the summer weather these days is just not like it used to be--and, unlike most "back in my day" lamentations, this one is empirically true! The year-to-year variability has increased; the range of weather considered "normal" and unremarkable is getting broader all the time. So much of farming relies on predictable weather, because plants like predictable, stable growing conditions. This widely varying weather, from drought to deluge, late freeze to blazing July, creates new rhythms we don't yet understand and can't adapt to on the fly.

Several years ago, I gave up on the idea that I could trust the old-time weather patterns from the era of the farmers I'd learned from, and began to intentionally diverge from the rubrics learned from those older farmers. I began doing fieldwork when it is possible, rather than waiting for conditions to be ideal, as ideal conditions became more elusive, and adjusted other practices to be more adaptable to changing conditions. And as weather continues to become more unpredictably extreme, I'll continue to shift to more resilient growing systems, like transplanting rather than seeding directly into the ground. These sorts of things take more work and used to feel silly if most years are all right, but the more those "outlier" years become the norm, the less silly it feels to instead see the "regular" times as the outliers and be sure to be prepared for an ever-widening range of possibilities in the future.

Farm Olympics

Did you watch any of the Olympics? It's hard not to see a few parallels to farming's physical feats, although I did only catch the highlights due to my full-time participation in the tomato-picking event here on the farm. In fact, for a long time, in Summer Olympics years, the farmers around here held the Farm Olympics, complete with all the events you might imagine: square bale tossing, speed market tent set up, round bale hurdles, triathlon (including pond swim), and the quadrennial favorite, the tractor & trailer back up. It was full of good-natured rivalry between neighboring farms, stories passed down year to year, and, in general, a celebration of the community of many farms all coming together at the hardest-working point of the season for the big neighborhood event.

And farming itself--at least this type of small-scale, seasonal, manual-labor based farming--often seems like an Olympic event done year in and year out. Surely farming would fall into the marathon category. A six month marathon, that is, with vegetables as pace setters, one foot in front of the other until the finish line, invisible on the horizon, inevitably arrives in November. Or perhaps, considering all involved, it's more like the pentathlon (or the dodecathlon, with one event per month): right now we are in Tomato Pick, having arrived here from Squash Pick, and before that, Transplanting.

In any case, here we are in the middle of the season. Up until the April starting gun I plan and prep for this year's trial, finding my niche and developing my style over the past 10 farm years, and then we're off! The event underway, it is up to me to rely only on that training and planning to see how well I can do. After a winter off it takes a bit to hone the relevant muscles, to acclimate to long days of physical work in the heat, to remember the technical skills of doing all the repetitive tasks quickly and accurately--the muscle memory and cognitive training built only through experience. For workers--and I remember this acutely--the first two weeks are nearly impossible; even for long-time farmers the first two weeks each year are a shock. Since the output of the farm is all physical objects (delicious vegetable objects!) created from physical processes, the work put in is entirely involved with manipulating things in the physical world.

One of the farm neighbors, whom I used to live with, ran marathons--no, ultramarathons--50 miles in the woods from which he came home unable to walk up stairs. I didn't get it, and still don't quite, except I realize I feel the same way about farming: there is the satisfaction in voluntarily setting up an almost absurd physical challenge, and then seeing if I can complete it--whether that's the big picture of picking vegetables for 20 weeks straight to pack and deliver 60 beautiful shares three times a week without fail, or the smaller challenges of picking squash every day for weeks on end, picking ALL THE TOMATOES, or getting an unreasonably giant list of fieldwork done before rain or darkness on a 90-degree day, then getting up early to do it again the next day. All of these things are objectively difficult, strenuous, and exhausting, and yet, just as someone might choose to run an ultramarathon, or climb a mountain or twelve, this challenge of the objectively absurd is what offers the satisfaction of completion. (And at least farming yields tasty vegetables!)

Tomato Tomtahto

Let's talk tomatoes! You may have noticed that there are two kinds of tomatoes in the bags this year: a regular firm, round, red, modern hybrid variety, and an heirloom-type that's dark, soft, oddly shaped, and very tasty. Although both are tomatoes just the same, we farmers and food writers somehow always talk about hybrid tomatoes vs heirloom tomatoes, with heirlooms definitely the gold standard in the tomato world. But what exactly is it to be an heirloom tomato?

The "social" definition of an heirloom tomato is one with a story: an open-pollinated variety cultivated year after year by careful seed saving which, because of superior quality, was kept in a family or achieved a measure of local or regional fame. Many heirloom types are from other parts of the world--cherished varieties that can be specifically tied to a group of people and were brought to America by early immigrants. The preservation of these seeds was not due to sentimentality, but because these were time-tested varieties bearing an implicit seal of approval. Heirlooms represent, quite literally, the interwoven fabric of both natural and human history.

But many backyard hobbyists and commercial breeders still create new open-pollinated varieties with standout "heirloom tomato" qualities even today. In fact, this year I'm growing out some seeds I saved from two fruits of unknown cross that turned up in the field a couple years ago. These new "heirloom" tomatoes have none of the lineage or history, but have all of the characteristic exciting stripes, colors, irregular shapes, and strong flavors we associate with other soft, thin-skinned "heirlooms." All these modern tomatoes meet the "aesthetic" definition for "heirloom tomatoes"--and yet, some of the historically kept heirloom varieties from 100 years ago or more were, in fact, plain red tomatoes, entirely uninteresting and which would never pass as heirlooms today on any restaurant menu or farmers market table.

Moreover, as much as the dark, soft, tasty tomatoes in your bags meet this definition of "heirloom tomato," they do not, in fact, meet the "scientific" definition--and, surely, science should be the one to settle all this confusion, right? Botanically, an heirloom tomato is simply any open-pollinated variety, as opposed to a hybrid variety of tomato. That is, pollinating the flower with pollen from the same tomato variety makes fruit containing seeds that will reproduce the tomato, true to type. Growers can save seed from their crop and sow again in following years. A hybrid variety, however, is grown from seeds produced by mating two open-pollinated varieties together.

And truth be told, the "heirloom" tomatoes in your bags today are in fact hybrid tomatoes produced by crossing two different heirloom tomatoes together. Scientifically, the heirloom tomatoes in your bags are just plain-ol' hybrids...but seeing them as heirlooms may offer a more useful understanding of culinary reality.

Some tomatoes are easily categorized, such as a hard red shipping hybrid from the grocery store or Radiator Charlie's storied heirloom Mortgage Lifter, but the more ambiguous the tomato, the more it pushes the boundaries of its label, the less these seemingly-intrinsic scientific categories help us understand the world.

And that might sound subjective and un-scientific but in fact, this is exactly how biological categories are applied even in biology itself. In conversation with a botanist friend once, I tried to pin down with them the essential features that scientists use to distinguish one plant species from another, and was quite disappointed to find my layman's understanding of science to be incorrect: plants are out there doing their plant thing, and nothing differentiates one species from another but scientists themselves, making up labels in their effort to describe and understand the world. Boundaries are ill defined, and, to my great consternation, the very same plant growing in two separate parts of the country may be called a different species, although they are otherwise identical!

In many scientific disciplines there is big debate between opposing factions of "Lumpers" and "Splitters" about how labels are best utilized; the lumpers feeling like putting similar-enough things together under the same label describes their world well, and the splitters feeling that slicing & dicing to fine-grained labels allows for better understanding.

This imperfect human interplay may be the real reason this whole idea of "what is an heirloom tomato" is so complicated in the first place--leaving us with, in the end, no "real" answer at all. All I can do, at this point, is to come down on the side of the lumpers for the weekly vegetable list and simply call them all "tomatoes."

We made it!

Well, we've made it through another farm season, and with one more week to go after tomorrow, you've just about eaten everything up! The cooler has been jam-packed for weeks with all the stockpiled potatoes, sweet potatoes, and squash, but we've just been sending it out little by little each week, and now all of a sudden there's plenty of room in there. And in the field, it seems like just about every week now there's some crop we've reached the end of, some new section of rows that are finally ready to be turned into cover crop.

You've seen the farm through its whole cycle start to finish, from the first leafy sprouts in May, through the heat of summer, then back again to leafy greens, and now moving towards the root crops of November. We've felt abundance, scarcity, and perhaps monotony--but never the same thing month to month, since your cooking moves through the seasons along with the farm. So too on a smaller scale, you've watched each crop tentatively arrive, flourish in its prime, and eventually decline as its time comes to a close. The grocery store may have just about every single thing just about every single week, sourced from somewhere in the world unknown, but here we eat from the same plants the whole time, and so we see the change as each plant moves from its peak of production to its eventual death and decomposition back into soil.

Take this week's peppers for example. These are the last intrepid remnants of plants germinated way back in March, transplanted in May, blasted by hail in July, finally bearing fruit in August for a few short weeks of big, beautiful peak-season red peppers, only to begin to decline soon after, with green peppers mixed in with the slowly-ripening reds. A week or two ago, as the real freeze was coming on, we spent all afternoon picking everything that remained: reds of any sort, half-ripe peppers mostly green with a stripe of red, and the true green peppers to save for later. So last week you saw those last true-reds; this week you have those peppers that were half-red when picked and have now ripened in the cooler to interesting shades; and next week will be the last true green peppers. As for the pepper plants? They're no more, all mown down just like they never were there at all, disced under and seeded to cover crop before Wednesday's rain.

These peppers are a bit on borrowed time, here in the second week of November, but then again, so is most everything else. These plants grew when there was warmth and light and there just isn't so much of that anymore, and so the CSA is coming to a close not because we've decided to stop, but because plants are no longer doing much of anything new! We're working through the last of what was produced during the growing season; soon enough there won't be anything left and it will be time for the season of rest.

Origins of seasonal culture

We are now deeply in the apple and pumpkin-craze season, which is what we have come to expect after the berry craze of late spring and early summer, and then the tomato frenzy of high summer. Have you stopped to wonder where these seemingly-recent seasonal fixations came from? It's not just the power of advertising.

Plants have over millions of years developed some pretty specialized strategies for getting a leg up on the competition. Some vegetables, like alliums (onions and garlic) form a bulb in the sun's summer energy to persist, alive, over winter, using that stored energy to beat the competition, and sending up a shoot first out of the gate when the weather warms. In spring they're some of the first vegetables we get.

In the summer, as you may know, most of the "vegetables" we eat are actually fruits. A fruit, botanically speaking, is a part of a plant that contains seeds–surrounded with something tasty to help spread the seed or to decompose, offering fertility to the next year's germinating seed–such as a tomato, squash, strawberry, or apple. But it takes a lot of energy to grow a fruit (first the plant, then flowers, and finally the delicious fruit) and that's why these are our summer vegetables, needing a long time to accumulate enough growth and sunlight to produce the food we want to eat. Other fruits solve this problem by using stored energy from last year to get the job done earlier (strawberries) or have figured out how to survive year-to-year as bushes or trees.

Now, in the fall, we are back to brassica greens–biennial plants gaining a foothold in the cool, meager growing conditions of fall where other plants decline, in order to grow just enough to survive the winter and send up a seedstalk at the first hint of spring. And of course, we have the fall storage crops like potatoes, carrots, squash and, yes, pumpkin spice.

Seasonality is no accident, but a product of the principle of evolution--everything developing its niche to succeed; to every thing, its own season. Why pumpkins for Halloween? Why potatoes and butternut squash for Thanksgiving? These are the plants that arrive in this season, and these are the fruits and tubers developed to last through the cold months–surviving without rotting to keep people alive during the dead of winter, just as they would otherwise survive to put up new plants in spring. Of course, it's not to the squash's plan to produce a butternut only to be eaten up in December... but isn't that, in fact, botanical success, to be cultivated on purpose, grown with care year after year, its genetics persisting for having found the niche of sustaining human life? As we take in the Halloween displays since September, pumpkin spice for weeks yet to come, then turkeys, everywhere, it's a small comfort to know that all this amped-up insanity of the advertising world is based entirely upon pre-industrial agricultural reality. It's merely marketing finding its niche.

So, enjoy your Halloween pumpkins and your butternut squash at Thanksgiving, and even your pumpkin spice. You're not just being trendy after all! The opposite of recent fad, this is culture tied to the botanical world that sustains our lives.